A Son Comes Home

When I regularly watched nighttime TV--I can't stand most shows now--I remember enjoying a laugh or two and then getting blindsided by a slam on Christianity or God. As a sincere follower of Jesus, those potshots usually hit a little close to home and left me thinking, "The writers just don't get it."

Fast-forward your DVRs to today where one of those writers finds himself among those he used to malign. Joe Eszterhas finally "gets it." He writes,

I am witness to and the beneficiary of God's love for all of us. ... I am witness, too, to the fact that His love is so strong that it was even able to open my rusty old closed heart. I will thank Him forever because He gave me new life and a heart which is truly able to love for the first time in my life. His love is mine.

A "cocaine cowboy" comes home and finds that God not only left the light on for him, but He ran across the north 40 to grab him up in His arms. Do we sit back like the other son, saying, "Great. Woo-hoo. Just wonderful," or do we join with God, rejoicing over Joe's life won back from death and hell?

God's love reaches beyond those rusted doors, behind the graffiti-scrawled walls, down into the lowest places we dare conceive our hearts can sink to. It reaches out, breaking through those defenses and reaching the heart of the most desperate with hope, the most abandoned with security, and the most broken with healing. His love does that. It takes the used up, the abused, the disfigured, the maligned and the humble and lifts them up, bringing glory to Himself. "The LORD has done this, and it is marvelous in our eyes."